Charles Blow, who is a writer at The New York Times and his son, a student at Yale University, may be the most recent high profile victims of police racial harassment.
In an emotional article by the writer, his son experienced what most Black men, who attend America’s so called Ivy League Schools also experience. Obviously the so-called pedestals of Western Values, of Democracy and Freedom – the Ivy League – seem to dim the torch of Western Enlightenment when it comes to confronting issues of race in America.
Charles Blow’s son was stopped, forced to stare up the barrel of a gun while on his knees, before slamming down unto his face on the concrete side walk to beg for his dear life, palms capping his occiput for protection in case he got himself shot from behind, by a white cop – essentially.
Yale is, by and large, a white community. New Haven, on the other hand, is diverse but segregated into the mostly black and poor areas, with little opportunity to none – no benefit of the doubt – and no margin of error; and the white neighborhoods with all the pomp and pageantry of the American dream fully realized.
The truth is that a young unaccompanied Black man, like Charles Blow’s son, who is not in a service uniform, like a security detail posted there to protect the precious white students of Yale – who would shield them from the ‘ravenous’ Blacks – is a rarity on that campus. A cursory look at the stats reveals a truth that is even less terrifying than the facts on the ground.
If Black men are not at Yale University to clean or serve, then they have to be suspects? I guess. I have no idea what else such ‘predators’ would be doing on a precious ‘white campus?’
Yale University is no better than the larger society of New Haven and beyond – societies that make innocence, safety and simple human dignity luxuries only to the few African American adults and children who toe their line – listen and obey what the white people say.
Or else, you die?
Charles Blow is obviously angry. His son could have been killed – shot dead I mean, for absolutely no law enforcement reason.
Alas for what? Another police officer, a female in fact, explained to Blow Jr. that students had called about a burglary suspect who fit Charles Blow’s son’s description. That suspect was apparently later arrested in the area.
[quote_box_center]When I spoke to my son, he was shaken up. I, however, was fuming. Why was a gun drawn first? Why was he not immediately told why he was being detained? Why not ask for ID first? What if my son had panicked under the stress, having never had a gun pointed at him before, and made what the officer considered a “suspicious” movement? Had I come close to losing him? Triggers cannot be unpulled. Bullets cannot be called back.[/quote_box_center]
That this incident took place on Yale’s campus is not new. Black men who have attended sister Ivy League schools, like The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, a diverse and segregated city as well, recount similar and even more gruesome stories.
Racism in America is pervasive. Just like it took the South so long to be broken, through a brutal Civil War, in order for it see slavery as inhumane and unacceptable, it seems that liberal America is on course to mimic the South and her stubbornness in its most frightening vituperation of an I-Don’t-Carelessness about Black suffering in America.
Racism in America is pervasive. It is not just on Fox News. It is not only practiced by Red necks, nor is it drawn out on Tea Party flags of war. It is not always as simple as lynching a Black man for looking in a white woman’s direction, and it’s certainly not only subtle, as in suddenly discovering that over 50 percent of our prison population is Black, in a country that imprisons its citizens more than Russia and China put together!
The Black community does not exist as an island. It exists within a society. It exists within a system. When there is poverty in Black societies, it reflects the exceeding disproportionate riches in white communities. When Black people cannot find work, it reflects a fact that they do not get hired, by white people, who by virtue of their wealth through the hard work of centuries of slavery now own everything – land – and who refuse to hire Blacks. When Black men go to prison more, it only reflects a society that puts Black men in jail for smoking a joint while it bypasses white men who sell and smoke the joints just as much, if not a whole lot more.
Do the right thing?
In America, Black people don’t exist until, on TV, we have a racial incident. And then it seems like it is just us, Blacks, talking to ourselves. No whites are found listening to anything we say. Not at Yale in new Haven nor at Benjamin Franklin’s University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and certainly not at their entire ilk.
So we are tired, really. We can’t have a conversation if we’re only talking to ourselves.
For white people to sit and listen it means they would have to understand that they are part of this system that oppresses others – Blacks. This system, which has evolved over the course of the development of this country. Some people have benefited from it and they call that privilege – white privilege.
Some of us have been oppressed by it – Black burden. But we are all the fruits of that system. And we all have to understand that we are all “raced” by it, as Toni Morrison would say. You are a race if I am a race. It is all constructed in that way. That I am Black, makes you white. I suppose? But if I am part of a race, then so are you. That means when I am poor, you are the reason I am poor, because I see you with all the money!
So, my conversation should be your conversation too!
But I have to admit that we, Blacks, are so tired of this conversation in America – a country that dashes to any war in the name of freedom and democracy, but obviously fails at implementing those Western values right here on her own turf. However, we can’t wish it away; we have to work it away. And we need everybody participating in that conversation.
That is if white country is willing to have that serious conversation.
Black mass incarceration can stop for a start. Equal representation in the police departments in our own communities must be the model today, for a change. Are we even asking to go police white neighborhoods? Why not? But equal representation is a good beginning – not diversity, that word now means a billion things to too many people. We want equal representation – that means by race too.
Plus, America’s second sin – the Native American genocide is the original sin – must be examined and reparations made. We deserve our share of American land. What freedom are we talking about when Abraham Lincoln conveniently ‘frees’ slaves without land or work? America can make this right. Land is a good beginning.
Otherwise, Charles Blow and his son will not be the last. Trayvon Martin will not be the last. Otherwise Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice will not be the last Black boys who take a walk outside and don’t return – who are shot dead for absolutely no law enforcement reason.
It must be done if America wants to call herself Exceptional.
Or this peculiar sort of ‘exceptional situation’ in America will go much further than out-of-control policing, high imprisonment, the wealth gap, bumbled executions, killing rampages, public approval of torture, failed military adventures, outrageous medical costs, and now a completely unnecessary measles outbreak.
That kind of American Exceptionalism will do more serious damage to the world’s perception of our country, which seems to be only interested in what happens outside of it.
[quote_box_center]
I am white, my brother is black. I have commented before, that as teenagers in inner city Detroit, I was stopped 1x by the police while he was stopped over 40x. In his 20s, he was also jailed in a holding cell for an entire weekend, “on suspicion” for a unsolved, high profile homicide. Like your son, he “fit the description”, and simply had the bad fortune of being in the vicinity of the crime scene. For that entire weekend, he was not allowed a phone call and police denied to us, his family, that he was being held. My brother has no criminal record and is a stable, kind working man. I wonder to this day if he would have been imprisoned for that murder except for the fact he had a middle class white family who challenged the police and the prosecutor.
If you wonder why people marched in Ferguson, “tearing up their own neighborhoods”, as many of my white friends did….ask yourself how you would feel if you or your child had to face the injustice and life altering disrespect of the all powerful police force on a daily basis. What happened to Charles Blow’s son and my brother, occurs constantly, every minute, all over this country, and it has got to end. It’s an egregious use of power by the police with devastating consequences, from psychologically traumatizing to loss of freedom to death.
~ H. G. From Detroit, MI.
[/quote_box_center]
Perhaps this story would help white country comprehend the American race problem better?
Perhaps it will help whites understand. Except like you said most do not want to understand something that will cease to benefit them if they understand it. Solving the race problem in America would mean balancing inequality between blacks and whites. Whites would have to accept that all that they have is not theirs. I personally don’t think they are willing to accept that.